Viewpoint: 4 things students should know about time management

Forgetting deadlines, missing assignments and not remembering to schedule enough time to get them done doesn’t just happen to the best students, it happens to all students.

It’s the night before your term paper is due — you know, the one that you were assigned at the beginning of the semester — and you’re staring at a blank word document.

Where did the time go?

Forgetting deadlines, missing assignments and not remembering to schedule enough time to get them done doesn’t just happen to the best students, it happens to all students. In college, it’s been said that between good grades, a social life and enough sleep, you can only choose two.

However, if you’re effective at managing your time, you can have it all and then some.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Get a calendar and use it.

Having some sort of calendar or day planner to write your assignments down in is infinitely useful. It doesn’t matter if you prefer the old school handwritten agenda or the newest smartphone app, the important part is that you have a place to write down and see your schedule.

Write down everything (even events that you are only “mildly” interested in). Write out your class schedule all the way to December, even if by week two of classes you know the time, date and place.

Also, being redundant can be a good thing for your memory (For example, I have a page calendar, a digital one and a whiteboard calendar). The most important part is being able to visually look at the things you have to do, next to the dates and times. This helps you tremendously in developing your organizational skills.

2. Don’t procrastinate, but plan time for goofing off.

We all do it. We flip on the T.V. or endless scroll through our Facebook and Twitter feeds, all while we should be getting “something” done.

The best thing you can do to combat the pitfalls of procrastination is plan time to procrastinate. Give yourself an allotment of break time to just zone out, but make sure that when it’s time for you to get back to work, you do.

As a New York Times op-ed noted earlier this year, relaxing actually can help your productivity. Based on several studies, it suggests that our bodies reach a physiological fatigue about every 90 minutes and need a break.

When you work out, you cannot constantly push yourself to its absolute limit without resting. Use this same strategy for college.

3. Go to bed and wake up a little earlier.

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says, “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.”

The proverb specifically talks about getting up early to tend to the growth and development of delicate rice paddies. In the days of the Empire, there was a flat rate tax you would pay, in rice, to the Emperor. If you put in the time with your crops to increase their yield, you would have an abundance left over to eat or sell at the market.

In a similar regard, you’re being taxed on your time, albeit for a good cause — your education. From reading assignments to studying, to research, there are a lot of tasks you have to fit into a day.

Start by getting up an hour earlier than you normally do. Don’t sleep in until the very last moment. Allow yourself some time to wake up and maybe even some time to re-read your class assignment.

4. Don’t try and multi-task

It is far more efficient to focus on the task at hand than try to juggle multiple things at once.